Otis Under Sky Connects with its Audience, and now with the SXSW Film Festival.

You may remember this post from a while back when I did some screen printing for a friends' fundraiser. The fundraiser was for the film Otis Under Sky, an independent movie shot in and around Austin and San Marcos, Texas. The friends were Anlo Sepulveda, the writer and director, and his wife Mandi, the producer and all-powerful-organizer.

Since then, Anlo and Mandi have had a baby, built an eco-apartment under their house, and generally had a crazy amount of stuff going on- and their friends have since had a baby who carries the moniker Otis! Also since then, Otis Under Sky has finished filming, started the final editing process, and been selected as one of only nine Texas films to be featured at the 2011 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here in Austin. Wow, what a ride!

The film follows a "socially inept video artist", Otis, through his enlightening and painful one-way love affair with Ursula. Otis is played with beautiful awkwardness by renowned slam poet Anis Mojgani. Google Mojgani and you'll find a multi-award winning, multi-talented artist- with plenty of live videos and rave reviews to back it up.

There is a little bit of Otis in all of us, especially those who've grown up with the internet. On one hand, it allows the painfully shy to reach out and connect with some level of anonymity to protect their fragility. On the other hand, it can simultaneously errode the real connections we have by turning them into disjointed and superficial digi-relationships.

One of the film's features is a light installation which is created as Otis's opus. It is a warm, pulsating, and glowing sea of thousands of tiny points of light and color, which responds to people's interactions with it. Hopefully in time for the movie premiere, the installation will be set up at some location in or around Austin, and the movie website will allow people all over the world to manipulate with the installation by interacting with it online. This is the part of the project that my husband Per has been helping with, so I'm sure it's going to be a busy few weeks for him before the SXSW film festival starts! (Check out his crew credit on the crew page! So proud.) :)

There are two trailers for Otis Under Sky available to watch on Vimeo:
http://www.vimeo.com/17308214
http://www.vimeo.com/1603686

How can you support Anlo and Otis Under Sky?
*Create some internet buzz for distributors to notice of by tweeting, blogging, or Facebooking about Otis. Comment on the video trailers and articles on the web.
*Like Otis Under Sky on Facebook and tell your friends to check it out, too!
*Donate: Anlo and crew are also accepting donations to help them along in the final push to make Otis festival-ready. Every little dollar helps! Plus, they are offering some cool rewards as a thanks for donations!